HENDERSON, Nevada (MindaNews/02 January) — Another year passes. An end, or a beginning. Either way, a passing on. The children start to pack up the time spent over the holidays. One by one, with their partners, traveling back to their own worlds. Places and homes you would like to visit more often but for the thinning wallet you constantly have to haggle with. It’s these times when we try to hold off, for a minute longer, the inevitable moments of parting.
The sudden quiet reminds us of the time when we came home from seeing them off in the airport some years ago, for the US. Realizing their paths to the future a world away from your own. That you were no longer going to be with them. The clocks ticking on the walls, becoming loud reminders of an utter loss. If there was a time for a heart to be breaking, it was that one.
But time also has to move on to the next chapters. This is one inevitability that makes those moments of seemingly tragic proportions (even if the memory still makes us break down in tears) a light to follow through.
This holiday season, the light certainly shone through. The year 2016, may have been more broken and absurd at times, hard and difficult to bear too. But then, life is not fair anyway. It is these things, the hard times, that should be what makes us stronger when we pass through the patch of broken glass.
Hardships being relative to whom it makes it’s presence known, has, in opinionated debates and arguments, been an endless source of disagreement. Needless to say, it remains what it is, to whomever or wherever it deems itself a necessary evil. Because without it, there can be no way to compare one side with the other.
It becomes a matter of choice. And, we choose to believe that its temporal nature relieves us of having to repeat the same cycles. Unless, of course, we choose otherwise.
Nattering on, let me continue to try to say, how, even if there is only one reader out there who takes time out to go through these paragraphs, it is with great appreciation that, at least, the space Mindanews gives this column, is worth it.
It is at this junction then that I would like to say, a huge thank you to the editors that decide if what I write should be published or not. Without their wise discernment and judgement, we would have gone down the road to some dark hole of perdition, if not outright trouble. Thank you for keeping the watch. Even for columns such as this.
It’s been a year since I was allowed to come back to writing here. I am hoping I will be allowed to continue in the next year.
This comes a bit late for a year-ender, but I would just like to have the opportunity to be thankful to 2016, even if it was not such a good year. Carry this spirit of thankfulness to the year ahead. Hopefully, also, to remember to be grateful for each day we have. Wake up to, and get to live another 24 hours.
It is, admittedly, difficult, but, if there is one New Year’s resolution we would like to have, it would be, to be able to sustain this mindset, or attitude through the year ahead. (Mindanawon Abroad is MindaNews’effort to link up with Mindanawons overseas who would like to share their experiences in their adopted countries. Margot Marfori is an author and visual artist from Davao City. She is currently based in Henderson, Nevada.)
